Amnesia of the Heart
by Perceptive Pawn
Summary: She never expected to be laden with the task of taking care of an amnesia patient, and she certainly didn't expect it to open doors to any second chances. You shouldn't walk on thin ice, let alone build on it. Spring will come, and it will bring thawing.
1. Early Autumn : A New Patient

"Talking."

'_Thinking.'_

'**Bijuu talking.'**

**I do not own Naruto. Don't be ridiculous. Kishimoto owns Naruto. **

'_How did this happen?'_

* * *

She barely had time to think as she barked commands to the nurses bustling around her. One to get a gurney, one to get an IV drip ready in the emergency wing, trauma ward 1, room 3C, one to contact Shizune with the preliminary information. They were rushing through the hallways of the hospital, usually quiet at three in the morning, with a group of five medics carrying the injured man with the help of chakra until the intern returned with the requested gurney.

"Kikuyo, go get some antiseptic; make sure it's our highest strength. Masari, go get antibacterial solution and a fresh package of gauze."

She raised the man's head higher, her hands already pumping chakra into his skull to assess his brain's condition while her eyes flickered back from the two heads of hair, dirty blonde and chocolate respectively, that hurried away to fulfill their orders. She felt the matted blood and grime that was caked into the man's ink black hair seep onto her fingers and work its way beneath her nails as she called for the procession to halt. The approaching intern, a petite girl with tan skin and olive hair named Jiwan, quickly wheeled the gurney beneath the net of medic arms and hands so that they could lower the badly injured man onto it and continue to Trauma 1.

The man was unconscious, his body just short of mangled. His breathing was shallow and alarmingly sluggish despite the frantic and labored pounding of his heart. She hadn't gotten a good look at him to identify him yet, her main priority being getting him out of critical condition. His legs were twisted at odd, yet familiar to Sakura, angles; she identified his right femur as an open comminuted fracture and his tibia in his left leg as an open spiral fracture. That along with multiple broken ribs, diaphragmatic rupturing, broken jaw, a subdural hematoma that she had already tended to via chakra through her fingers right in the lobby where the ANBU had left him before forcibly removing a very upset red-haired woman, a concussion, numerous contusions and abrasions, both shoulders dislocated, and torn tendons and ligaments and rotor cuff in his right arm. This man was a wreck.

They turned a corner, narrowly missing an unknowing intern as they pushed through the double doors of Trauma 1. They hurried into the room, just hoisting the man off of the gurney and into the bed as Kikuyo and Masari reached the room with the supplies. She shouted to one of the nurses that she needed to fill out this man's chart, pointing at her to single her out among the throng of medics in the room with one hand and keeping the other pumping chakra into the man. Lowering her arm back down to his chest, she flipped her long, silky pastel pink hair over her shoulder and dove into her work.

The medical personnel flowed around her, not one of them getting in her way as she focused solely on repairing his internal damage, starting at most significantly threatening and working her way down the list. The light outside of the door pulsed red to signify the critical state of the patient, casting a throbbing red hew over the man's pale and bloodied face as she worked. One nurse hooked up his IV; one gingerly swabbed a festering laceration on his left arm; another two quickly removed his destroyed shirt and pants, leaving him in a pair of loose clean black shorts; one intern checked his airway before carefully inserting a tracheal intubation tube and starting the mechanical ventilator; all finished their duties and bowed to Sakura before exiting the room to let the head doctor continue her work.

She finished knitting his diaphragm back together; reset his six broken ribs and wrapped them in the gauze she had sent for; reset the bones in his legs as best as possible and loosely knitted them to allow for faster natural healing before splinting them both; she deeply cleansed and stitched his laceration on his left arm; realigned both shoulders by means of closed reduction; put ligaments and tendons back in their proper places in his arm and loosely stitched them together before splinting it; she even applied some topical ointment to his abrasions. He remained unconscious the whole time, his black hair matted and fallen into his face and the rest of his face smeared with dirt and blood and various other grime.

Shizune had come to confirm the circumstances around the patient's arrival, and had already left. She had even taken it upon herself to hook him up to the heart monitor. Sakura was used to working alone though, as she was more than capable of handling most situations that entered the hospital. Shizune had recently become more of a fixture at the Hokage's office than at the hospital.

She washed her hands, sanitizing them with the hospital's soap, before moving across the room and back to the patient. She slipped even further into her medic mindset as she brought an antibacterial washrag to his face, gently pushing his hair out of the way and carefully dabbing away the blood and filth. She paused, using one foot to hook the leg of a stool behind her and pull it forwards. Sitting down upon it, she propped one elbow up on the bar that ran along the length of the bed and leaned over the man's chest to get a closer look at his jaw, which had some purple bruising along it where it was fractured.

She brought three glowing fingers up to it, focusing solely on his jaw. She was so absorbed in her work that she didn't notice the furrowing of his brow, or the fluttering of his eyes. She did notice, just slightly too late, the twitch of his lips into a hard grimace of pain. Retracting her hand, she realized just how close she had gotten. A surprised gasp escaped her lips when the man jarringly jolted into an upright position, smacking his forehead against hers in his haste. She winced in mild pain, rearing back to stare wordlessly into the confused, pained and angered sharingan eyes of Uchiha Sasuke.


	2. Early Autumn : Return

Disclaimer: I do not have the pleasure of owning Naruto.

* * *

She stared, dumbfounded, into the partially crazed Sharingan eyes before her.

'_Sasuke? The patient is SASUKE?'_

The intensity of his glare was drastically impaired as he winced, one eye shutting in pain. The medic in her sprung to life in her subconscious and spurred her to fling her hands, pumped full of perfectly controlled medical chakra, up to his temples. He jumped at the action, and started to try and attack her and win his freedom from the hospital bed, but only managed to groan in pain before she lulled him back to sleep with her chakra. No matter whom the patient is, no medic in her right mind should allow them to struggle and worsen their preexisting injuries. She gently eased him back into his laying position, carefully turning his head to the side and sliding the white pillow that went with the hospital bed into place.

She backed up, falling limply onto the stool behind her when her knees failed her. Here was Sasuke, the boy who completely shafted her every time she approached him throughout their childhood, the teenager who they had scoured the nations for throughout their adolescence, now a man and badly injured not five feet away from her the very year she turned 18 and was legally an adult. Was this Uchiha going to haunt her for all of her life?

She raised one partially numbed arm to twist the knob on his IV drip, releasing the second bag of fluids to begin their drip into him. Those drugs would keep him well under until her mentor had figured out what to do with the formerly-missing nin.

"Damn it Sasuke, as soon as we decide to stop looking for you, you just show up in our village alone—"

That thought struck her. What was that nagging thing at the back of her mind? Something about his arrival…Oh! That was it! He hadn't been here alone, had he? There had been that red-haired woman with him…but the ANBU had taken her away…away to where? Her head swam for a second as she tried to piece everything together. What had they known about Sasuke's whereabouts prior to his unexpected appearance?

He had taken down the fouler third of the Sannin; that was confirmed. And there had been sources that claimed he had left Otogakure with three other people, all rumored to be heading to the Akatsuki. That meant that for the red-haired woman to be in Sasuke's company, she had to be part of the group he'd formed in Oto. And Sasuke had to have felt safe with her near him; the youngest Uchiha had a habit of acting like a cornered and skittish wild dog when he was hurt, and if he let her stay near him without maiming her, he must've wanted her there.

She needed to go have a talk with this woman.

But first and foremost, she needed to go report to Tsunade. She hadn't had a name to put on the forms, so there was no way for the Hokage to know exactly who was laying in Trauma 1. She stood slowly, the greater part of her consciousness still in partial emotional shock.

She couldn't help herself; she was glued to the spot. She decided, or rather her body did, that she could spare a few minutes to really look at Sasuke instead of analyzing him as a patient. His hair was longer, his jaw was more defined. She noticed that he was very toned for his stature; he was probably somewhere in the ballpark of 5%-2% body fat. She noticed that he looked a lot like someone that she'd seen somewhere before, obviously like himself but strikingly similar to someone who's name she couldn't put her finger on.

She noticed his eyes moving beneath his lids, a sure sign of deep sleep. She couldn't help but smile, only a small smile, at how vulnerable and very much like his younger and happier self he looked in his sleep. His usually stony and apathetic expression had melted away as he had slipped back into unconsciousness. She was mildly put off by that fact that it hadn't left a peaceful expression in its wake, only a blank one. The blankness was softened by the fact that his mouth was just partially open in his sleeping state; if they had been several years younger, she would have giggled at how very much **un-**grumpy he looked.

She sighed to herself, her gaze dropping down to the floor while she straightened her skirt out of habit. There was no place for that type of thinking in the situation she had found herself in. There was a very dangerous traitor to the village inside of their hospital with unknown numbers of allies inside the village walls as well; if the red-head was here, why couldn't the other two be here as well? There wasn't time for her reminiscing.

She turned away from him, her back erect and her head held high, and silently exited his room. She closed the heavy metal door behind her and locked it before grabbing his patient forms out of the slot in the door and making her way out of the hospital and towards the Hokage's office.

* * *

He sighed, shaking his head wearily as he stared at the hard, cold rock before him. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets, his only visible eye trained in on the two etched names that he had irreversibly engrained into his brain. He hadn't been able to protect his teammates, and he wished everyday of his life that they would just walk back into the village, babbling something about a mission that they had just completed. But deep in his heart, he knew that there would never be a day when that would happen.

He often thought of them, and that led to thinking about his own squad of misfits. History really did repeat itself. He just wished, for the sanity of the two remaining members of his original team, that their missing teammate would waltz right back into their lives before it was too late.

* * *

Please review~

Tell me what you think, or at least whether or not it's complete crap.

-Perceptive Pawn


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